Ellipsis

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  Ellipsis is the official blog of Autodesk's Technical Evangelist Team. We will discuss all things design and manufacturing related with a focus on industries such as automotive and transportation, consumer products, industrial machinery and building product manufacturing and fabrication. We also have resident experts who will blog about specific product developments in CAD, Simulation, Industrial Design and Data Management.

  We look forward to providing you, our user community, with the most relevant and up to date developments in our industry, and hopefully with information that will assist you in doing your job better, faster, and more precisely.

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  You can go home again...
  April 25, 2008 06:36 AMby Jay Tedeschi

  If Inventor 2009’s new view manipulation controls prove anything it is that you can go home again… in fact, you are going to have to.  Gone is the “Iso View” from the Right Click menu…

  

  Previous versions of Inventor allowed the user to use the “glass box” to set any of the 8 possible Isometric view projections of the model as the “Iso View”. This could then be restored at any time via either the F6 key or the Right Click/Iso View menu selection.  Inventor 2009 allows users to store ANY view as what we now call the “Home View”. Quite simply this is achieved via the little “Home” icon positioned to the upper left of the “View Cube”, which itself is a new addition to 2009.

  If the user hovers above the Home icon, and right clicks, a specific view control menu appears, and among these commands is an option to set the current view as “Home”. 

  

  There are additional options available which allow the user to set a fixed distance or have the view always fit to the screen.

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  Without a trace...
  April 17, 2008 02:37 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  One of the most significant changes from an ease of use standpoint in Dynamic Simulation has to do with the workflow required to add traces to simulation output. Inventor Simulation Suite 2009 moves the trace tool itself to the Output Grapher, and now allows users to create additional traces without re-running the simula­tion. Dynamic Simulation data is now cached after a DS run, and new traces can be added by simply specifying the point or points on the model the user wishes to track data from. 

  

  There is no longer any need to re-run the simulation, which has the potential to save the user a significant amount of time.

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  The object of your inquiry...
  April 4, 2008 09:58 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  Is easier to find than you may think. I know that for many of you this may be your first exposure to AliasStudio. Although it is fairly new to our suite of manufacturing tools, it has been the premier industrial design tool in industry for many years. It gives its users the ability to conceptually sketch, paint, model, render and analyze product designs. One of my goals for this year is to help you get acquainted with it, and de-mystify it as much as possible. So, with that said, let’s jump in the water… maybe not the deep end, but not the shallow one either.

  AliasStudio utilizes layer structure to allow it’s users to store and group data of any type based on the users preferences. Talk to 10 different users and you will probably get 10 different opinions on how best to utilize layers, but suffice it to say, that for any user facing the task of working with a model that he or she has not touched in a while, or data from some other user, the discovery of specific entities may be a bit daunting.

  

  In the image above, I have selected a set of surfaces from my model. Note that I have access to all of the entities which are near or under the cursor, the dialog box allows me to browse, with interactive highlighting, all of the possible selections. Having picked the item of interest I now want to find more information about it. Is it part of a group? What layer is it on? The Object Lister in AliasStudio can be used much like the browser in the Inventor products, and will allow me to discover the information I am interested in.  From the Windows pull down menu I can access the “Object Lister”.

  

  The Object Lister can be set to “Show” or organize data in this window based on layer structure or object association. If I select the up/down arrows to the right of the “Search & Pick” window, the Lister display will scroll automatically to the highlighted model entity selected earliler, expanding the object hierarchy as necessary to do so.

  

  

  Well, that’s it for today’s AliasStudio introductory session. I hope it was helpful. See you next week! By the way, if any of you find this useful, leave me some feedback and let me know… it would be nice to hear from you.

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